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Why don't they get this? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 4 months ago (10 children)

In the US it makes sense. Much of our corn is grown for ethanol so ot can be used for fuel. Replace that with solar and we reduce our reliance on a monocrop and end up with far far more power.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they'll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.

    In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can't help but think of the forest that could have been there.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Turning it back into a forest will never happen when the land owner needs to pay taxes on the land and thus need to make income of the land. These solar fields are usually on private property. Not public land. Either they put windmills and solar on the fields or they raise cattle or grow crops. Which one is better for the environment overall?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it's an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It's complicated, very expensive, and doesn't do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don't make one from scratch.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there's a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they've been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it's thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.

    But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We'd have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it's not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it's not going to happen anytime soon.

    And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

    I'm not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from "stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground" you can imagine. You can't even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn't work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don't want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you'll get one tree the way you want it to be.
    Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn't a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it's a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
    Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    I've seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old "real" forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can't grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.

    And as further proof that I don't live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here's 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    A bunch of twigs does not a forest make.
    In a pre-industrial Europe, sure, forests are everywhere and foresting alone like crazy. But we're in a post-industrial one. Most land in Europe is altered in some ways, was farmed on at some point, or had something else going on. Everything is littered with plants that we selectively bred or mutated, a wild very aggressive weed are everywhere and will be everywhere. Soil composition is wild and weird. The air is unfit to breathe the food is unfit to eat I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore, you get the point.
    It's not that it can't grow without human assistance, the human assistance is needed to keep it from human interference, because we changed the land and continue doing so.
    But obviously, sometimes a forest just grows, when it wants to. But you can't guarantee this process, that was my point.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    To give another example:
    ...
    Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. "Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort," says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate.
    ...
    Chazdon, who has studied natural regeneration for more than 30 years, questions the commonly held assumption that trees need to be actively planted to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. "There's a perspective that humans did this damage and it's our job to fix it, and that we should govern the process, and just let nature help when it can," she says. "Another view is that forest restoration is fundamentally natural, and that humans can assist it, but ultimately it should be governed by natural processes.".
    ...
    Proponents are arguing for natural regeneration to be taken more seriously in national and international efforts to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises. Recent research has shown that natural regeneration can potentially absorb 40 times more carbon than plantations, and provide a home for more species. It is also significantly cheaper than tree planting, with different studies in Brazil showing costs reduced by 38%, or even up to 76%.
    ...

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-reason-wild-forests-beat-plantations

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I mean, yeah, that obviously happens a lot. But we started with how easy it is to plant a forest on any unused land, and ended with a forest growing into a bigger forest under the scientific observation getting into national news.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago

    There is no direct adjacency needed to spread seeds from one plot of land to another, that's one of your made up hurdles. Small seeds naturally get blown far in the wind. Larger seeds still get carried large distances by animals, which was why I specifically copy pasted the bit about birds carrying acorns ...

    To claim that it would be difficult and expensive to let a wild forest grow in those meadows is absurd, that's what this was about for me. It's a convenient excuse to do nothing, but it's not a very good excuse.

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